Balance, crisp play in first half push Wisconsin women’s basketball past Northern Illinois

MADISON – The Wisconsin women’s basketball team didn’t let off the gas Wednesday night.

The Badgers jumped on Northern Illinois with a 16-0 run in the second quarter and steadily added to their lead before closing out a 75-54 victory at the Kohl Center.

The win, which raised UW’s record to 5-2, was marked by balanced scoring, good decision-making and a defensive effort that resulted in 22.9% shooting for the Huskies. That’s the lowest for a Badgers opponent this season.

“I really loved watching my team in the first half,” Badgers coach Marisa Moseley said. “I think we played some of the best, most clean basketball probably since I’ve been here. It was one of our best showings.”

If was definitely Wisconsin best showing of the season in a handful of ways:

* Scoring balance – A season-high five players scored in double digits for UW. Sophomore Serah Williams finished with 16, followed by freshman D’Yanis Jimenez (13), sophomore Sania Copeland (11), senior Natalie Leuzinger (10) and sophomore Ronnie Porter (10).

* The 75 points were UW’s second-highest of the season. The team shot 44.4% to give the Badgers their best shooting days of the season in the last two games.

They shot a season-high 53.6% in an 82-72 victory over Boston College Saturday.

“I just think right now we’re playing very unselfishly, which is boosting everyone’s confidence,” said senior Brooke Scrhamek, who finished with nine points, eight rebounds and a career-high six assists. “The ball isn’t sitting in one person’s hand. We have a lot of confidence in each  other and the girls coming off the bench, too, that they can make that shot. … We really feed off each other’s energy and confidence.”

* UW finished with 20 assists and a season-low 12 turnovers. That 1.7-to-1 assist-turnover ratio was a season-high.

* Northern Illinois hit 16 of 70 shots and went 11 for 40 (27.5%) from three-point range for its second-lowest three-point percentage of the season. The Huskies entered play shooting 33.5% from beyond the arc.

Wisconsin led for the final three quarters. The game turned with a 16-0 run early in the second quarter in which five players scored. Ten of the points came on layups or points in the paint.

Jimenez had five points during that run, part of a 10-point individual run over about 3 minutes for the 5-foot-8 point guard. Porter also had five points during that stretch to turn a four-point lead with about 9 minutes left into a 36-16 lead advantage with 5 minutes 12 seconds to go in the quarter.

The Badgers led by as many as 22 points in the first half and owned a 29-point lead in the third quarter before Northern Illinois trimmed it to 21 by the final buzzer.

That wasn’t the sprint to the final buzzer Moseley wanted but still a pretty good showing overall.

“Second half, as a young group we had a little bit of a lesson in the locker room in the sense of just talking about how you continue to finish what you started,” Moseley said, “how you continued to play at a high level when it’s not necessarily about the scoreboard but the way in which we respect the game but also respect the work they put in to get to that point.”

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